Hello!

It's been quite a long time since I updated this page and figured now would be a good time for a small announcement. This IS a small announcement too.  Due to the current events regarding, y'know, "the state of the world", I have found it difficult to work on a game that is essentially about trying to save mortals from leading to their own destruction. Back in February I began working on solo play test to help iron out mechanics. I had initially planned for that to be one long devlog, but by round 2 it ended up being 7 pages as there was just SO MUCH I wanted to talk about. I will likely continue on with that game and move the thoughts into smaller devlogs some time. Eventually. 

I may need to scrap that play test though since I figured out two very important things about this game and how it should work.

One is changing all instances of the word "Civilization" and "Civ", etc, to "Society". There was some feedback I had gotten early on regarding that by using the word "Civilization" unintentionally implies that there are "uncivilized species".  My original reaction to this was essentially "I see what you mean but that's just kinda the unfortunate connotation of the word, I guess." But it stuck with me enough to think on it. In this game you can have all sorts of societies that are not anything like how humans or traditional fantasy creatures live. If you want to run a game where the "civilization" is just regular ants in an ant colony or a group of trees with interlocking roots, you can do that. I want the language of the game to better reflect and inspire that sort of play. I think folks get hung up on what is typically thought of as "civilization" and feel it needs to be changed. I'm not sure if "society" is the best fit, but it's both boarder and more exact.  Currently the language I wrote up for how the game views the word "society" is as such:

A Society is a loose collection of individuals who share some common factors that bring them together. This can be stuff like ideology, faith, and who/what they follow, or as simple as proximity, timing, and location within imagined borders.

The second thing is regarding what the game does when you're not focused on the people. A lot of this game happens before you have anything you'd call "people" in it, but a lot of the rules are focused on interacting with those people. So there's a slight change to the way defining the world works. Now when a deity uses Shape Land or the landscape is otherwise defined, you have to describe something interesting or unique about that space. It needs to be within a single sentence and can't be too descriptive, but rather lays the ground work (no pun intended) for other players to expand on. Examples:

• "This forest here crackles with magical energy."
• "The desert is made of light blue and dark blue sand that arranges itself in a spiral pattern."
• "There are always heavy clouds here but it never rains."
• "The jungles are home to exploding wildlife."
• "The mountain is protected by a species of rock golems."

As you can see you can define some pretty heavy things about the world now, including creatures and possible societies. You would still need to use the other actions to give those things more detail, but it hopefully will make creating the space more interesting while also providing a spot for undeveloped ideas. 

Ok! That's all from me now. This is basically just "Yes, I'm still alive and yes this game is still in active development."  

Thank you and I hope you're all well.